How to EASILY create and remember secure passwords

Nearly every day someone on the media is banging on about insecure passwords and how the some reason it is OUR fault that the Internet is so insecure. Anyway, that seems to be the situation and the more and more sites demand us to make create more secure passwords. The trouble is, how to remember them?  Here are a few ideas which will help you make your passwords more secure and even better give you the tools to remember them.  Jak1234 is a poor password - I have seen worse, someone I knew had the password bobbydog named a dog they had pictures of on Facebook. No Really!

  Ibi!!atGr8woC is a good password as it had letters both uppercase and lowercase numbers and symbols. If you read this blog to the end you will be able to create and remember it.

But first some 'do's.'

Longer passwords are more secure than shorter ones. Most websites have a minimum and maximum length always aim more towards maximum.

Use different passwords on different systems- you can even customise the level of security depending on what application you're using if you want.

Change your passwords as often as you can. The ideal would be every month but we live in the real world and I know it can be a hassle to do this but I know some people have the same password for years. The longer it is in existence the greater the chance of it being hacked.

Use a combination of numbers, letters and if possible special characters. Note: you might need to check with various websites which characters are allowed and excluded. This is why  Ibi!!atGr8woC is such a good password as it uses all of the elements.

Over the years I have used and seen different techniques for remembering passwords. One method is to remember a combination from childhood that for some reason had got stuck in your memory. An old car registration number or place and telephone number for instance. I remembered the car registration of my grandfather's car was 1527pp, so GF1527pp was quite a good password as it is easy to remember. The prefix GF by the way stood the grandfather.

Another method is keyboard shapes. I am a visual person and I found this quite useful in the past. There are some obvious shapes and combinations. Avoid qwerty for obvious reasons. The same also applies for azerty which is the same thing but on a French keyboard.  Doing diagonals from a start letter is a possibility. For instance, something based on grncy which is a cross shape from the letter G as a starting point. Look at your keyboard and you'll see what I mean. Then add a numerical value  (I have used the year of the moon landing) and a capital to become Grncy69 or grncY69. This is not a bad choice and certainly better than using bobbydog!  Actually, when working with someone with learning difficulties I created a cardboard template that was placed over the keyboard to visibly give them shape to follow.

In the end, most of us find the use of mnemonics as a memory aid as one of the most useful tools. This is how I would remember the password.  Ibi!!atGr8woC.

What is it stand for?

I became ill at the great wall of China.

To make it more difficult I changed it to I became ill at the Gr8 wall of China.

This translated to (I) ( b)ecame ( ill)  (a)t ( t)he ( Gr8) ( W)all of (C)hina.

The final twist was to transpose the letter L in the word ill for two exclamation marks. This gives the password all the elements of a seemingly random sequence, a mix of upper and lowercase letters as well as special characters.

Try it. Make up a phrase that you can remember and manipulated in a similar manner. When you create it for yourself you will be surprised how easy it is to remember. In the end, you can never be 100% secure but adopting these good practices will certainly minimise the risk.

Keep safe.